Back to School Books! Medieval Education

No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education

Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen and Douglas Jacobsen

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (August 3, 2012)

Summary

Drawing on conversations with hundreds of professors, co-curricular educators, administrators, and students from institutions spanning the entire spectrum of American colleges and universities, the Jacobsens illustrate how religion is constructively intertwined with the work of higher education in the twenty-first century. No Longer Invisible documents how, after decades when religion was marginalized, colleges and universities are re-engaging matters of faith-an educational development that is both positive and necessary.

Religion in contemporary American life is now incredibly complex, with religious pluralism on the rise and the categories of “religious” and “secular” often blending together in a dizzying array of lifestyles and beliefs. Using the categories of historic religion, public religion, and personal religion, No Longer Invisible offers a new framework for understanding this emerging religious terrain, a framework that can help colleges and universities-and the students who attend them-interact with religion more effectively. The stakes are high: Faced with escalating pressures to focus solely on job training, American higher education may find that paying more careful and nuanced attention to religion is a prerequisite for preserving American higher education’s longstanding commitment to personal, social, and civic learning.

Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c.1100-1330

Wei, Ian P.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (June 29, 2012)

Summary

In the thirteenth century, the University of Paris emerged as a complex community with a distinctive role in society. This book explores the relationship between contexts of learning and the ways of knowing developed within them, focusing on twelfth-century schools and monasteries, as well as the university. By investigating their views on money, marriage and sex, Ian Wei reveals the complexity of what theologians had to say about the world around them. He analyses the theologians’ sense of responsibility to the rest of society and the means by which they tried to communicate and assert their authority. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, however, their claims to authority were challenged by learned and intellectually sophisticated women and men who were active outside as well as inside the university and who used the vernacular – an important phenomenon in the development of the intellectual culture of medieval Europe.

Reading in Medieval St. Gall (Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology)

Grotans, Anna A.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press (July 19, 2012)

Summary

This book was first published in 2006. Learning to read in medieval Germany meant learning to read and understand Latin as well as the pupils’ own language. The teaching methods used in the medieval Abbey of St Gall survive in the translations and commentaries of the monk, scholar and teacher Notker Labeo (c.950-1022). Notker’s pedagogic method, although deeply rooted in classical and monastic traditions, demonstrates revolutionary innovations that include providing translations in the pupils’ native German, supplying structural commentary in the form of simplified word order and punctuation, and furnishing special markers that helped readers to perform texts out loud. Anna Grotans examines this unique interplay between orality and literacy in Latin and Old High German, and illustrates her study with many examples from Notker’s manuscripts. This study has much to contribute to our knowledge of medieval reading, and of the relationship between Latin and the vernacular in a variety of formal and informal contexts.

The Woman Reader

Jack, Belinda

Publisher: Yale University Press (July 17, 2012)

Summary

This lively story has never been told before: the complete history of women’s reading and the ceaseless controversies it has inspired. Belinda Jack’s groundbreaking volume travels from the Cro-Magnon cave to the digital bookstores of our time, exploring what and how women of widely differing cultures have read through the ages. Jack traces a history marked by persistent efforts to prevent women from gaining literacy or reading what they wished. She also recounts the counter-efforts of those who have battled for girls’ access to books and education. The book introduces frustrated female readers of many eras—Babylonian princesses who called for women’s voices to be heard, rebellious nuns who wanted to share their writings with others, confidantes who challenged Reformation theologians’ writings, nineteenth-century New England mill girls who risked their jobs to smuggle novels into the workplace, and women volunteers who taught literacy to women and children on convict ships bound for Australia. Today, new distinctions between male and female readers have emerged, and Jack explores such contemporary topics as burgeoning women’s reading groups, differences in men and women’s reading tastes, censorship of women’s on-line reading in countries like Iran, the continuing struggle for girls’ literacy in many poorer places, and the impact of women readers in their new status as significant movers in the world of reading.

Science and Technology in World History: The Black Death, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution

Deming, David

Publisher: Mcfarland & Co Inc Pub (May 31, 2012)

Summary

This installment in a landmark series on science and technology’s role in world history begins in the fourteenth century, explaining the origin and nature of scientific methodology and the relation of science to religion, philosophy, military history, economics and technology. An authoritative, lively narrative follows the history of human knowledge and discovery, including detailed discussions of ideas, individuals and innovations. Specific topics include the Black Death, the Little Ice Age, the invention of the printing press, Martin Luther and the Reformation, the birth of modern medicine, the Copernican Revolution, Galileo, Kepler, Isaac Newton, and the Scientific Revolution. By incorporating not only the history of natural philosophy and specific sciences but also the cultural milieu in which the sciences developed, this work highlights the essential human element in the evolution and understanding of science.